171–180 of 194 posts
There is a surreal component to all this.
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Is gas not taxed or am I missing something?
Yes it is but there are 2 items at issue: - if we are concerned about environmental externalities (as we should be IMO) then we have to ask if current taxes were designed to price those externalities or if they were just designed to pay off infrastructure. As far as I understand, it's the latter, so if we want to ensure polluters pay, whether they operate an AI data center or an Acura, we might need to charge more. I…
> There’s an acute water shortage in The Netherlands right now. When I open BlueSky, everyone is talking about water being increasingly wasted on cooling data centres. And for what? To generate more AI shit. Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be…
I have a friend (engineer) working on a data center in Texas. It is closed loop. What’s interesting is the chillers have so much condensation that they pump it out to sprinklers which water the desert which now has grass growing. So at least water doesn’t seem to be as big of an objection now. Power though? Still a problem.
Data centers being built by me - more than 20. A friend of mine works for an audio engineering firm and shared that the tech does not really exist yet to do more than get the modern data centers within city noise ordinances. You are going to hear them for a couple miles. As if I needed convincing he was legit - last week his coworker got flown out to my neck of the woods to conduct a study on the planned DC's in my town.
The opposition, though. They are not armed with sensible facts when they show up to city council meetings. They are armed with clickbaity headlines. I joined the local DC opposition group to offer advice on how to get the city to take them more seriously and was quickly banned for talking sense.
Right, all they're going to do is rip the concrete out and repour it, causing even more damage to the environment (concrete production and curing is unbelievably C02 intensive) I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
Sabotage works by introducing friction into your opponents activities. Sabotaging one piece of one data center doesn't do much, but the more you do, the more outsized the impact. Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a…
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I understand why people are frustrated with the current system in general. You wouldn't design it this way. We need more young politicians shaping the laws and more entrepreneurs improving society.
That can't happen, because political positions are basically hereditary. Do you know what happened to every other hereditary political system?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it is but there are 2 items at issue: - if we are concerned about environmental externalities (as we should be IMO) then we have to ask if current taxes were designed to price those externalities or if they were just designed to pay off infrastructure. As far as I understand, it's the latter, so if we want to ensure polluters pay, whether they operate an AI data center or an Acura, we might need to charge more. I…
It's not vibes if you use numbers. Have the first 10 kWh be free, the next 100 are charged at $0.10/hr, the next 1000 at $0.20/hr and go up from there. (Whatever numbers actually make sense.) If the factory only uses a house's worth of electricity, they pay the same rate. If a house uses a factory's worth of electricity, they also pay the same rate as the factory would.
To be clear, I think you’ve got the right direction – free stuff for humans up to a point and then market rate for everyone/everything after that. I just think it’s silly to pretend that companies are polluting for shits and giggles. They’re polluting for us.
I think that pricing pollution is the right way to go, I just know that the outcome isn’t going to be some magical world where companies pay for pollution but consumer don’t. The only way it works is that the costs get passed on and the consumer pays.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not vibes if you use numbers. Have the first 10 kWh be free, the next 100 are charged at $0.10/hr, the next 1000 at $0.20/hr and go up from there. (Whatever numbers actually make sense.) If the factory only uses a house's worth of electricity, they pay the same rate. If a house uses a factory's worth of electricity, they also pay the same rate as the factory would.
What is the factory exists to serve 10,000 houses? To be clear, I think you’ve got the right direction – free stuff for humans up to a point and then market rate for everyone/everything after that. I just think it’s silly to pretend that companies are polluting for shits and giggles. They’re polluting for us. I think that pricing pollution is the right way to go, I just know that the outcome isn’t going to be some ma…
The environmental impact discussion is always incomplete because it only looks at AI in isolation. LLMs do exactly nothing by themselves, they are always used to facilitate some human endeavor, so we need to take a holistic view of the system. I had previously done some napkin math ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984659 ) which found LLMs + humans are way more efficient than humans alone, but that analysis i…
That ignores the fact that the then-unemployed human will not change it's resource consumption in any way, because a human coding or a human sitting around idly do have roughly the same resource footprint.
Except of course if you are arguing for doing the Skynet thing and terminate all humans replaced by AI...
> There’s an acute water shortage in The Netherlands right now. When I open BlueSky, everyone is talking about water being increasingly wasted on cooling data centres. And for what? To generate more AI shit. Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be…
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That sounds likely to be true. They'll move operations to a temporary building while they build a new one. To some extent their ability to make plans will be disrupted, but the effect those plans would have had on the climate is unknown: the result is just that the oil company behaves in a more stupid and poorly-planned way, while doing some extra construction.
What if every time the oil company got a new HQ, it burned down? Would that increase or decrease climate change?